Book Release: A Visit From the Goon Squad

A novel that's a globe-trotting, decade-leaping romp about music-industry people with fashionable foibles

Novelist and journalist Jennifer Egan has the cool blond looks of a classic Alfred Hitchcock heroine. Think Grace Kelly in Rear Window or Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. Like those characters, whose crisp, feminine elegance housed formidably imaginative, unabashedly risk-taking personas, the statuesque Egan is a boldly intellectual writer who is not afraid to apply her equally powerful intuitive skills to her ambitious projects.

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The New York Times Magazine contributing writer has published three acclaimed novels—The Keep, Look at Me, and The Invisible Circus—and one collection, Emerald City and Other Stories. Just out is her fourth novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf), and while it's a time-trekking, tech-freakin' doozie, the characters' lives and fates claim the story first and foremost, and we are pulled right in. Sitting in a window seat in a bright splash of sunshine at Olea, a Mediterranean bistro in the Brooklyn neighborhood where she lives with her two sons and husband, David Herskovits, the director of the avante-garde Target Margin Theater, Egan says she wanted to "write a novel about time" and was influenced by such disparate sources as James Salter's book Light Years and the strong episodic character turns on HBO's long-running hit show The Sopranos. But it was Marcel Proust's massive, multivolume In Search of Lost Time, which she had tried to finish but bolted from in her twenties, that "made a huge impression" on Egan when she returned more recently to the masterpiece. There, she found the topics of time and its corollary—change—that would become the dynamic engine driving A Visit From the Goon Squad.

The book is brilliantly structured, with storylike chapters that revolve around aging music mogul Bennie Salazar, his skittish assistant, Sasha, and a mosh pit of major and minor oddballs whose lives intersect, bisect, and disconnect in 1970s San Francisco and at scattered times between then and the near future in New York City, rural Africa, and Naples, Italy. When I ask Egan to describe how she wrote the book, her answer is immediate and emphatic: "So much of it was written in the shower! I would stand in the water and all these connections would start happening. Things I had wanted to make happen but didn't make sense in the whole began to connect. It was such an organic feeling, and I just had to pay attention. All in the shower!"

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Still, adds Egan, "The book is a little mysterious to me." She homes in on Goon Squad's penultimate chapter, "Great Rock and Roll Pauses," which she wrote PowerPoint-slide style. For Egan, a "handwriter," this exercise was completely counterintuitive. "That chapter, and the whole book really, felt like it was different [from my previous books], and it just kept asking me to be interested. What ended up not working were the narrative pieces that were master-plan based. Ultimately, I didn't care, because the level of obsession, being led by interest and desire, was fun. It felt like such a guilty pleasure."

The afternoon sun moves imperceptibly across the window seat. The moment I notice the light shift, Egan tells me, "You know how when you have lived a certain number of years and you find yourself leapfrogging through your life? You sense both the immediacy and the distance of the past? I am making those time leaps in my own life all the time, and I know that informed the book."

Then she references Jean-Paul Sartre's novel The Reprieve, saying: "You only start to care about time when you realize that time is finite." Egan delivers this starkly beautiful if somewhat penumbral sentiment in her characteristically sunny, engaged voice—ready to savor the next leap.